Freedom Index
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Slavenka Drakulić, Croatian writer, journalist and Index contributor, whose work covered topics from war in the former Yugoslavia to a novel on Frida Kahlo, has died aged 76. Born in Rijeka in 1949, she began her career as a journalist in the 1970s, going on to contribute to publications such as Index, The Nation, The Guardian and Dagens Nyhete, alongside publishing a number of fiction and non-fiction books.
When Index first published an essay by Drakulić in 1993 she had left Croatia for Sweden following a hit piece that described her and four other prominent female Croatian writers as “witches” and “traitors”. In her response entitled Close-up of death, she wrote angrily about what she called the “book keeping” of death since 1945 which had changed nothing for the tens of thousands of people under siege in Sarajevo during the Balkans war.
“Generations have learned about concentration camps at school, about factories of death; generations whose parents swear that it could never happen again – at least not in Europe – precisely because of the living memory of the recent past. They are fighting this war. What, then, has all that documentation changed? And what is being changed now, by the conscious, precise bookkeeping of death that is happening in our lives, in our living rooms, while we watch transmissions of the dying in Sarajevo?”
In a speech called Who’s afraid of Europe?, reprinted in Index in 2001, she warned of rising nationalism across the continent, asking “what exactly constitutes Europe? Where does it begin and end?”. Twenty years later she wrote again for Index. Emotional baggage explores the few items a refugee decides to pack before fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Drakulić’s 2003 novel They Would Never Hurt a Fly explored the personalities of accused war criminals as they went on trial for their actions during the breaking up of Yugoslavia. Commenting on the trial of former president Slobodan Milošević, the novel asks yet again how seemingly ordinary people become perpetrators of atrocities.
Drakulić’s final book Zašto nisam naučila kuhati (Why I Never Learned to Cook) released shortly before her death, is a collection of essays discussing her relationship with food through a series of personal vignettes.
Translated into over 30 languages, her work is easily accessible to a global audience. Drakulić will be remembered as one of Europe’s strongest feminist voices, one who has influenced a generation of writers and journalists through her chronicles of war, nationalism and communism.
Slavenka Drakulić was born on 4 July 1949 in Rijeka, Croatia and died on 20 June 2026 in Sovinjak, Croatia aged 76
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